STATE OF CRITICISM
31
WILLIAM PHILLIPS:
I thought you were a structuralist, not a psychoan–
alyst.
ROSALIND KRAUSS:
It doesn 't seem to me that words like
denotation
and
connotation
are unapproachably difficult terms. What I am saying is
that I think
Peter
is speaking for a certain group of us here who are a
little bit disturbed about what we see as this meeting's continuation
of a kind of general American hostility in journals and reviews
against what you insist on calling structuralism-and it isn"'t. It's
something that's absolutely happened after structuralism.
EUGENE GOODHEART:
I didn't use the word jargon, so I'm not going to
defend my position in those terms. I do think it is a possible criticism
of this conference that it was insufficiently dialectical in the sense
that the structuralist position has not been adequately and fully
represented by structuralists who are able to argue the position fully.
The leading paper on structuralism was presented by Denis Dono–
ghue, who presented a very lucid, very gifted exposition, but he was
essentially critical of structuralism and it might have been better to
have had il presented by a structuralist. Anyway, Barthes and Derrida
do get public attention. I have been arguing against something else,
against the idea that there is something in the method of structural–
ism or post-structuralism that can be communicated to the act of
reviewing itself.
EDITH KURZWEIL:
I am hearing this, of course, from my own sociologi–
cal perspective. And I find it interesting that structuralist writers
cannot get reviewed. I assume the reference is to structuralism in
general, that it is being discarded, dismissed as jargon. But the same
thing holds true for people who are writing on structuralism and
who are critical of structuralism. Articles or books written against it
are automatically being sent to structuralists who are on the defen–
sive. They devastate anyone who is even mildly critical. I think this is
to some extent symptomatic of the ideology of structuralism itself, of
the underpinnings that don't seem to come out. My own sense is that
there is a certain politics or nonpolitics in structuralism which is
beneath the surface and which we haven't really talked about, except
to some extent when Roger Shattuck touched on different aspects of
morality and so on. I think that we s'hould talk about these underly–
ing components rather than the method of structuralism.
ELLEN LAMBERT:
It seems to me that the questions of what reception
theoretical work would get or of censorship are different from the
question of how this particular theory encounters the literary work
itself and what application it has. Can structuralism engage a work,
